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October 25, 2026

Tony Rhodes gigged this flounder in the New River near Sneads Ferry, N.C.

It’s an all-night gig

It is not often that a recreational trip to procure fish begins well after dark. However, guide Allen Jernigan met a friend, Tony Rhodes, at a ramp in Sneads Ferry, N.C., at 9:30 p.m. […]

Suspending a live shrimp beneath a popping cork is a tried-and-true trout-catching tactic.

Like skinning a cat, there is more than one way to rig a live shrimp to catch speckled trout. The old standby is a length of leader beneath a stemmed popping cork, sometimes referred to as a rattling cork. Even with a popping cork, some anglers prefer to use a standard J-hook, while other may opt for a Kahle hook or circle hook and still others a jighead. […]

Five shrimp tricks to try on trout

Phillip Gentry

Speckled trout eat shrimp throughout their life, starting as fry and continuing through the gator years.
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Kevin Davis has weighed in plenty of huge blue catfish on the scales at his business, Blacks Camp.

Trophy cats: a biological perspective

Terry Madewell

Chad Holbrook, a fisheries biologist for the S.C. Department of Natural Resources who oversees the Santee Cooper lakes, said biologists use winter gill-net sampling to assess blue catfish populations and, the data shows increasing catch rates from 2016 through 2018. […]

The Santee Cooper lakes have been producing trophy blue, channel and flathead catfish for more than 50 years.

A long-time trophy fishery

Terry Madewell

A 58-pound channel catfish was caught from Lake Moultrie in 1964, setting state and world records that still stand today. While the Santee Cooper lakes provide excellent fishing for numbers of channel catfish, the sizes are no longer extreme and are not typically considered trophy size, even for channel catfish. […]

Restrictions and bag limits are almost non-existent for white perch. The fish are an invasive species and considered a nuisance by most states in the southeast.

Year-round white perch

Phillip Gentry

While guide Zakk Royce confines most of his perch fishing to Lake Gaston along the North Carolina-Virginia border, you’d be hard-pressed to name any reservoir in North Carolina’s Piedmont or South Carolina’s Midlands that isn’t chock full of them. […]

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